And now for something completely different ...

A good journalist knows when to put down the dust mop and grab the camera.

Was that "Knol" or "Null"?

So Google has this new thing called "Knol" that is going to replace "Wikipedia" by being more complex. Instead of people just dropping in and changing entries, now they'll have to sign their names and, if they want to change things, as I understand it, they'll have to consult with the original writer.

Now, I only change things for a living, but this sounds like ... well, never mind. Let's look up some things and see how they do, because it's not fair to trash a concept without giving it a chance.

So ... how about Jimmy Stewart?

Search Results:

No results found for Jimmy Stewart

Okay. Let's look up "Thirty Years War."

Search Results:

No results found for Thirty Years War

That's okay. Um ... Mona Lisa ...

Search Results:

No results found for Mona Lisa

How about "Missouri"?

Search Results:

No results found for Missouri

Search Results:

No results found for Mickey Mouse

Search Results:

No results found for Julius Caesar

Search Results:

No results found for penguin

Search Results:

No results found for America

Search Results:

Results 1-3 of about 3 for dog

• Dog training

  bySierra Senyak

  

  Published version 2. Last Edited on Fri Mar 21 17:54:42 PDT 2008
• The Dog Trainers' Trainer

  byLeslie Smith

  

  Published version 3. Last Edited on Mon Mar 17 11:40:48 PDT 2008
• Dog Genetics

  

  byChristian Ashlock

  

  Published version 9. Last Edited on Fri Feb 15 11:25:25 PST 2008

Finally! Let's look at "Dog Training" by Sierra Senyak. Here it is:

***********************************

No dog is born with good manners. Pooping on the carpet, leaping enthusiastically onto guests, pulling so hard he practically yanks your arm out of the socket when on walks -- that's all perfectly acceptable in the canine world. It's up to you to teach your dog to behave the way we humans want him to. Not training your dog and expecting him to be pleasant to live with is like never sending your child to school and expecting him to ace the SATs.

As well as making life with your dog more enjoyable, training is the best gift you can ever give your pup; friendly, housetrained, well-behaved dogs are less likely to be surrendered to shelters or put down. Plus, training is a great way to bond with your dog or puppy.

Despite the adage about old dogs and new tricks, there are no age limits to teaching dogs: puppies as young as three weeks old can learn, as can adult dogs of any age. And whether you've got a brand-new pup or a senior dog, the first step is the same: learn how to be a good teacher.

See all at DogTime.com.

****************************************************

The verbiage here is cut-and-pasted from Dogtime.com, which is a commercial site that wants you to basically buy in. So this Knol entry is essentially an ad.

Let's go the next one:

Um ... it's another director to Dogtime.com

Okay, let's try the third entry:

****************************************************

Today, class, I will be lecturing on dog genetics. As you may know, our canine friends are descended from wolves. How did wolves turn in to dogs? Humans messed with their DNA by selective breeding. Want to create a dog with a long tail? Only let long tail wolves mate.

Dogs are wolf mutants.

What can we learn from this? The more your dog looks like a wolf, the closer your dog is to nature. The wimpier your dog is, the more your dog is a man-made freak. I know this is harsh, but it is the truth.

You homework assignment is to use the visual scale below to rank your dog’s wolf-freak level.

****************************************************
(I didn't stop ... that was the entire entry)

Oh, yes, this is much better than Wikipedia. Now, granted, Wikipedia has entries for Jimmy Stewart, Thirty Years War, Mona Lisa, Missouri, Mickey Mouse, Julius Caesar, penguin, and America, but when you ask about dogs, what do you get?

Well, you get an article about dogs, and you get references to

• Bark (dog)
• Dog king – Scandinavian tradition
• Dog licence
• Dog odor
• Dog paddle – basic swimming stroke
• Dog park
• Fear of dogs
• List of dog breeds
• List of dogs
• List of fictional dogs
• List of most popular dog breeds
• Subspecies of Canis lupus
• Wolf-dog hybrid

But nothing about Dogtime.com

You call that a reference work? Feh.

The people of old Mississippi should all hang their heads in shame!
I can't understand how their minds work --
What's the matter -- Don't they watch Les Crane?
But if you ask me to bus my children
I hope the cops take down your name
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal.

-- Phil Ochs ..................

(That's Crane on the right, interviewing Mario Savio
of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement)

I remember the Les Crane Show and was surprised to read that it had such a short run. I suppose it hit at the right moment -- I was still at home (so I watched TV) and I was at an age where I stayed up late. Apparently, I wasn't in the demographic he needed.

And today I'm in the wise-ass demographic that will come away from this obituary pondering a man who divorced Tina Louise and married a woman named Ginger.

In any case, there was a time when the media was truly liberal. Les Crane, Laugh-in, the Smothers Brothers, David Susskind and the like were all over the tube. Very good for the New Yorker crowd, perhaps not so good for selling Shake-and-Bake.

Paris Mis-Match

Obituaries and other disasters

The death of George Carlin has stirred up conversation on the topic of obituary cartoons, on Daryl Cagle's blog, at the Daily Cartoonist, at the convention of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists and at rec.arts.comic.strips, as well as some other places.

Obituary cartoons seem to bring out the worst in cartoonists -- cheap, maudlin dreck that they ought to be ashamed of, but which readers seem to love. How bad does it get? How bad can it get? When Jim Henson died, someone drew weeping Muppets. Can it get worse than that? Of course it can, and has, and probably will again.


But obituary cartoons don't have to stink. Consider this entry by Thomas Nast, upon the death of James Garfield. (Click on any of these cartoons to see larger versions.)

In order to appreciate this cartoon, you have to first recognize the setting: Garfield had lingered for nearly three months after being shot, and the country was on death watch. In those days before CNN, the world didn't come to a screeching halt. For one thing, Washington was out there someplace -- while the Civil War had begun the process of creating national awareness, people still identified primarily with their own backyards because they didn't have a lot of access to other places. But the news came once a day, and once a day, the President was still dying, until the day came when he was dead.

The other factor is that Nast's symbol here is Columbia, the tall, powerful warrior goddess who is normally seen armed, in helmet with shield, protecting the nation. Here, she is a woman, unarmed and consumed with grief. Compare this with John Tenniel's cartoon on the same topic, in which the goddess remains powerful and the message is far more unfocused and sentimental.

In Tenniel's cartoon, some undefined woman, presumably the American citizenry, is sad and must be comforted by Columbia. In Nast's, the mighty goddess herself has been brought to her knees.

Nearly 75 years later, cartoonists got another shot at the same topic, and the most famous cartoon to emerge became one of the most famous cartoons in the genre. Bill Mauldin had wrapped up work for the week in Chicago and gone to a press luncheon of some sort. But before the speaker could start, an announcement was made of the events in Dallas and that roomful of journalists cleared out. In the days before cell phones and the like, the level of chaos must have been high, but Mauldin got hold of an editor and asked if he could get something in. The answer was yes, but hurry. This cartoon was drawn and inked in a fury of inspiration and the Sun-Times, a tabloid, splashed it across the back of the Extra, where sports would have gone in a regular edition.

When the bundles were dropped off at the newsstands, the newsies took one look at the cartoon and flipped the bundles, selling them off the cartoon on the back rather than the headlines on the front. The paper disappeared.

What vaults Mauldin's cartoon above the average weeper is the triple he managed to bang out -- He's got a murdered president mourning another murdered president. And, given Lincoln's reputation for compassion, he has a murdered man mourning another murdered man. But he could have shown Lincoln, stovepipe hat in his hand, standing in a graveyard. By using the statue from the Lincoln Memorial, he invokes the American people mourning their president.

Jackie Kennedy asked for the original, which is now in the Kennedy Library.

You can't demand that cartoonists be inspired at this level; you can't demand that cartoonists come up to the level of Nast and Mauldin anyway. It's like going to a production of "Hamlet" and saying, well, Olivier did it better. However, both cartoons give readers that emotional catharsis they want without being cheap and obvious. It's not too much to ask cartoonists to go beyond, "Gosh, we sure are sad!"

What is it fair to ask for?

When the Columbia exploded, there were any number of cartoonists who depicted "Seven New Stars in Heaven." But here's an example that shows the peril of trying to be sensitive without really thinking things through.

The Pearly Gates are a decidedly Christian symbol, and much of the criticism of the George Carlin cartoons has been based on the militant atheism he made central to his act, and the sense that it is inappropriate to show him in a Christian afterlife situation -- though several cartoonists used the opportunity to have God criticizing his use of profanity, which seems odd in light of how often cartoonists defend the First Amendment.

In this case, the cartoonist uses the Christian symbol of the Pearly Gates, but apparently realized that one of the astronauts was Jewish, so depicted one of those "Seven New Stars" as a Mogen David. This would be sensitive if (a) it didn't tend to single the guy out as "not one of us" and (b) if Jews believed in a conscious afterlife at all similar to the Christian version.

And one of the astronauts on the Columbia was Hindu. Now whatcha gonna draw, bud? A cow? Once the cartoonist recognized the religious disconnect, he needed to abandon the cliche and find something else.

Meanwhile, David Horsey, more often praised for his draftsmanship than for his insight, knocked this one out of the park. Drawing in Seattle, the issue of heat tiles and mechanical failure was no abstraction for his readers, and this cartoon bypasses the weeping and gets down to the nitty-gritty. (Note: I am not sure how soon after the Columbia disaster this cartoon appeared, and it may not be entirely fair to compare it to those done on tight deadline in the wake of the crash. But it's still a good contrast between mawkish sentiment and making a coherent point.)

When the World Trade Center fell, more than 30 professional cartoonists came up with nothing better than the Statue of Liberty weeping. I haven't bothered to post an example because they were all interchangable and pointless. Nobody needed to be told that America was sad. There had to be a better way, and Clay Bennett nailed it. Unlike Mauldin's seamless marriage of President, man and national symbol, this blend requires some manipulation, but the graphics work so well that the artificiality is deliberate without being jarring or unnatural. This cartoon simply works.


Meanwhile, across the sea, Peter Schrank came up with this obvious but excellent cartoon. Drawing on the familiar classic makes the reference accessible to most readers, and the substitution of Wall Street for the bridge works graphically. By drawing the globe as the screaming man, Schrank reflects the universal horror of that moment, a time -- however subsequently squandered -- when the world stood beside the United States in its revulsion for the events of September 11.

I think when you see how well cartoons can respond to death, loss and disaster, it makes the cheap weepers and Pearly Gates cliches that much more insulting to the reader and depressing for fans of the genre.

Dig the beauty

"Ask a toad what beauty is? He will answer you that it is his toad wife with two great round eyes issuing from her little head, a wide, flat mouth,
a yellow belly, a brown back." -- Voltaire

This fellow wandered by the office the other day and I shot a picture of him before taking him down to the wetlands at the edge of the property. He was pretty big -- when I picked him up, he filled my hand and hung out at each edge.

But looking at the picture, I wonder about the phrase "ugly as a toad." (You might do well to click on the picture to see the detail.)

Look, first, at those eyes, at the gold in his irises. Do your eyes have those highlights?

And check out the beads, the colored bits at the end of his little nubbins. And look at the number of little nubbins on his body. Ponder the complexity of it all.

And see the soft, pinkish ends of his fingers. If only he could understand numbers, and wealth, think of the safes he could pick with those sensitive fingertips!

Okay, yes, it looks like he walked through a cobweb at some point. But consider the level of detail in this little beast.

"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."

Voltaire contends that beauty is subjective. Fair enough. But this is a beautiful little animal.

Great Literature, Part Deux

Rather than respond to the comments on the last post within the comments section, I thought I'd start a new entry and let Dave Kellett have the riposte. The comic above (click on it for a larger, more readable version) is actually the third of a pretty funny series, which starts here, but the strip is on my daily diet, and many other people's as well. I've been a fan of Dave's from back in his days as an undergraduate at Notre Dame, when he did a strip called "The Four Food Groups of the Apocalypse," which I have actually referenced here. He's now one of a handful of people making a living from a web strip rather than trying to deal with syndicates and the print medium.

When I was in college, we were supposed to read "Moby Dick" and this was exactly my reaction. With "War and Peace," I felt that I was missing something because I didn't have time to just sit down and really read it, but with Moby Dick, I gave it an honest shot and then bought the Cliff Notes.

Moby Dick is one of the books that people say they wish had gone on forever, and, while I felt it had, I decided to go back after college and give it another look. Same effect as above. By contrast, I went back and read "War and Peace" and, as noted in the previous post, am now reading it again. What I didn't mention then is that this is about my sixth or seventh time through. It's an amazing book and I live with the characters, who are the most three-dimensional I've met in all of literature.

But, while I've re-read "Two Years Before The Mast" several times, I haven't been able to get through Moby Dick once.

Another pair of books I couldn't read even after college were "The Brothers Karamazov" and "Don Quixote," the former (despite having read and enjoyed several other Dostoevsky novels) because it was too much like being back in school, like a prolonged and somewhat tedious lecture, and the latter because the picaresque nature made it seem repetitive to me ... like a Bugs Bunny cartoon where the character gets flattened by an anvil and then jumps up and has another adventure with no apparent bad effects.

Your mileage may vary, and thank goodness for that, because it's one of the advantages of books over television. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Danielle Steele outsells Tolstoy, Melville, Dana and Dostoevsky combined, but you can still find their books despite their poor ratings.

So far, it just hasn't been a Miserable summer

(I was telling my son Gabe that I'm about through reading the new translation of "War and Peace" and enjoying it very much ... but given the constraints on my time, I can only read two or three chapters a night, so I don't know how many of the insights I'm gaining are from a more dynamic translation and how many come from the slower pace. It reminded me of this column I wrote back in August of 1994.)

Boy, I hope I don't run into Victor Hugo at the grocery store. I've had his book for over a year and I still haven't gotten around to reading it.

I really meant to. I read the first chapter and really liked the tone and the flow and all, but I thought I'd better put it aside until summer. A big book like that, I wanted to be able to really settle in with it.

Yeah, well, summer's half over and I haven't even picked it up. Sorry, Vic, but you know how it goes.

It has been years since summer meant weeks of uninterrupted reading time, but it still seems like the right time to settle in with that book you've been meaning to read. Some of my favorite books are things I read over the summer: "Catch-22," "Tale of Two Cities," "The Once and Future King," "The Possessed."

The summer before last was the summer of "Anna Karenina," which turned out to be something of a disappointment, but a disappointing meal at the Tolstoy Restaurant is still pretty good grub.

I suspect the reason I haven't gotten to "Les Miserables" is because I set it out as a task, albeit one I was looking forward to, and I've been putting it off to read small things that I figured I could dash through first.

For instance, there was an odd little book I picked up at my friend Terry's used bookstore in Star Lake, which chronicles the experiences of a political reporter in Albany during the Gilded Age. The trials of Fantine and Cosette and Jean Valjean may be great literature, but a first-hand, ringside account of the break-up of the Tweed Ring and how the federal election of 1876 was stolen is pretty fascinating stuff, too.

I value the classics, but I love finding out-of-print books that were published once and then never again. I dropped into the Cornerstone during Mayor's Cup and came across a French-language instructional book written in 1917 for American soldiers headed overseas. Now, in addition to "Where is the library?" and "In the morning, Papa takes us to the Louvre Museum," I can also say, "Fix bayonets" and "Did they support the attack?"

With a little practice, I'll be able to say, "Let's go to the library and attack Papa with bayonets."

Used bookstores are a treasure chest of obscure and wonderful things. I once found a Civil War memoir, replete with eyewitness accounts of almost no action at all, since the author's regiment was on the peninsula with McClelland, and thus spent most of its time waiting for the moment to be just right, which, as Civil War buffs know, it never quite was.

I wonder if McClelland ever got around to reading "Les Miserables?"

The all-time coolest book I ever found in a used bookstore, however, was a 19th-century guidebook for young, India-bound wives of British civil servants and military officers. It's a how-to that tells what servants you will need to hire, the duties of each and how much you should pay them. It gives recipes not only for European-style dishes made with ingredients found in India, but also for household cleansers and medical remedies.

And it contains important housekeeping tips for those on the subcontinent: For example, you must put the legs of your wooden furniture in saucers of water and have your servants check the saucers daily, because the white ants will make a quick meal of unprotected end tables, and, when going up into the hills to escape the heat of summer, you should pack your dishes on the mules and let the camels carry the less fragile household goods.

If you are wondering why on earth I need to know not to pack the good china on the camels, you don't get it. Truth be told, the world is full of wonderful bits of knowledge that nobody really needs. For that matter, does anybody really need flowers or roller coasters or ice cream?

Anyway, the summer is half over and I haven't even transferred "Les Miserables" from the living room bookcase to the bedside table. There's no way I'm going to get through it before Labor Day.

I wonder what they do to you if you get caught reading out of season?

This column first appeared August 7, 1994, in the Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, N.Y.

In our last episode ...

Serve and Protect: Maine style

Tonight I went to vote on the school budget. When I gave my name, one of the poll workers said, "Mike Peterson, from the Franklin Journal?" I acknowledged that, and he said, "We were trying to get hold of you the other night, and we didn't have a phone number for you."

Turns out he was an off-duty Farmington police officer. About 10 days ago, the alarm at the office went off. The security company tried to call me, but I was covering a meeting. I discovered the message on my phone after I got home. I called the alarm company back, then called Dispatch. They told me a police officer had been sent to the office but found everything secure. I still went down to the office to have a look around, but life went on. We never did figure out what had set off the alarm.

When I told this to the guy at the polls, he said he'd been on duty at the meeting I was covering (it was a public hearing on the school budget) and had been called out to respond to the alarm. "You should have come back and gotten me," I said, and we laughed. But I gave him my cell number and he wrote it on a piece of paper.

Now Dispatch will know how to get hold of me in an emergency.

As we were talking, I remembered that I needed to talk to a sheriff's deputy I had failed to connect with during the day. We do a weekly summary of the department's activities, and one of the calls was a report of an intoxicated man who was arrested for firing a rifle "in the direction of a neighbor."

I was pretty sure they meant "a neighbor's house" but wanted to distinguish it from actually drawing a bead on the person. So, after I left the polling place, I called Dispatch and they connected me with one of the deputies who had gone on the call. Yes, he said, it was the house, not the individual. "Well, I didn't want to make it sound any more exciting than it was," I said, and he chuckled and observed that a drunk guy with a gun is pretty exciting to begin with.

But he also told me that the female deputy on the call, Heidi, had done a really good job of cooling things down. It turned out that she knew the family, she knew the young guy with the gun, and she was able to talk to them on a personal level and persuade him to come out and let her get things cooled out.

"She's, like, the queen of community policing, isn't she?" I asked with a laugh, because two months ago, she made an arrest of a burglar on her own (very rural) street. There was a guy who was a fugitive from Florida who was living in his pickup truck and burglarizing camps out in the boonies. Well, in a small town it doesn't take long to pick up on this stuff and so everyone knew to watch for a red Ford truck with Florida plates.

The police get a call one morning that the truck is in a driveway on a particular rural road. As it happens, Heidi lived a few houses down on the same road, and was home sick that day. A few houses the other direction was another deputy, David, who just happened to be home because it was his day off. Dispatch called the two of them at home, and Heidi and David just walked out their front doors, one turned left, one turned right, and they walked down the street and arrested the guy.

Now, obviously, there was some coincidence involved in this, and the police got a huge laugh out of the master criminal who chose to rob a house on that particular street. But the fact is, our police live among us. This is community policing.

I grew up with some of that: The state trooper in our town was married to the daughter of my second grade teacher. He was part of the community as a cop, but also as Mrs. Nolan's son-in-law. There's a bond there you can't get in a larger place, and it's the kind of bond that means that, when Heidi shows up on a call and finds a drunk guy firing off a gun, she can talk to him as a friend of the family.

So, now, about the picture at the top of this blog.

We have a couple of pretty sizable paper mills in the area. A truck from one of them was heading for Montreal a few weeks ago with a load of paper when he went off the shoulder, hit some soft dirt and rolled. The rolls of paper weigh about 700 pounds each, and they smashed through the side of the truck when it went over.

A wrecker came and got the 18-wheeler and hauled it off. The trucker was fine; he was standing across the road waiting for a ride home to Canada. But here were two dozen very heavy rolls of paper in the ditch. What to do?

What you're seeing in the picture is called a pulp loader, and it's an arm that is designed to pick up logs, three or four at a time, and load them into the truck. I suspect that the Canadians who designed that robotic arm for the shuttle had spent a little time in the woods, because it's very much the same thing.

In this case, one of the firefighters who responded to the accident was also a logger. That's him, sitting in the seat operating the pulp loader and, instead of wearing a conventional hard hat, wearing his firefighter's helmet. That's his truck and he just went home and got it, picked up the rolls, loaded them on his truck and hauled them away.

Saved the clean-up crew a tremendous amount of work, and it was a perfectly logical solution, though it was the first time that loader was used to haul the stuff after it was processed, instead of well before.

I ran the picture on the front page with the slug "Maine problem, Maine solution." People thought it was pretty funny. But, hey, it's just part of how people solve problems around here.

The persistence of memory

I'm not at all a fan of Hillary Clinton, but I know what she meant about Bobby Kennedy and June. It was easy to remember that Bobby wrapped up the California Primary in June, because his assassination is indelibly etched in our minds, and it was June.

It was early June, because I was home, in that niche between the end of classes and the beginning of, in my case, summer school. Another student might have been taking a little time before reporting to a summer job, or might remember being new on the job when the news came.

For my part, I was up early to do some fishing. I'd brought a transistor radio down to the dock, because you could get radio back in the woods that early in the morning. The dock was across the road and down a hill from our house. I got down there and got set up and then turned on the radio and heard the news. It was probably 6 a.m., so it was 3 a.m. in California and not so many hours after the shooting. I fished for a little while, listening to the coverage, but then I wrapped it up and went back up the hill. My parents were up and had also heard the news.

I wasn't a big Bobby Kennedy fan. I had done a little work for McCarthy, working the phones downtown one afternoon, but politics wasn't really my thing. My opinion about Bobby was that he was an opportunist and that he wasn't likely to bring the war to the kind of immediate end that a lot of people felt he would. On the other hand, I realized he was more electable than McCarthy, and so, however imperfect, he was the chance to turn the machine around.

That is, he had been.

Which is to say, I was not a fanatical follower; barely a follower at all. And yet if you asked me when the California Primary was held in 1968, I would say "June" without hesitation. In May, I was still in school. In July, I was back in summer school. In August, I was home again, and the streets of Chicago were in chaos.

Bobby died in June, of course. We all remember that, where "we all" is the set of people who were in college during the presidential campaign of 1968. I kind of doubt that the editorial board of the Argus-Leader consists entirely of people who were in college in 1968; I suspect that it contains at least a couple of people who weren't anywhere at all in 1968.

But I'm part of Hillary's "we all." I was just through with my freshman year at Notre Dame; Hillary had just wrapped up her junior year at Wellesley and was bound for the "Wellesley in Washington" summer program, and from there to the Republican Convention as a Rockefeller supporter. She would turn voting age less than two weeks before the election.

So I understand what she meant, and it wasn't about assassination. It was nonsensical, but it wasn't about assassination. It was simply a claim that primaries have gone into June before. Well, yes, they have, but Bobby had only entered the race March 16, two weeks before LBJ announced that he would not seek a second term.

I had to look that up.

I remember when LBJ made his speech, though, because it was the night before April Fool's Day, and some jokes were made about that.

And I remember when Martin Luther King was shot, because it was less than a week after LBJ's speech. So it was early April.

If LBJ hadn't spoken just before April Fool's Day, however, I wouldn't be able to pin it down like that. If, for instance, he had spoken just before Easter, I might remember that he spoke before Easter and MLK died a few days later, but then I'd have to look up when Easter fell in 1968.

But now comes the interesting part about memories and dates and chronologies and timelines:

The picture above is of Bobby speaking at Notre Dame. He came through town as part of his campaign in the Indiana Primary, and he attracted quite a crowd, more, I think, because he was a Kennedy than for his politics.

My memory of the day was that I was towards the back of the crowd as Bobby spoke, but when he started taking questions, a familiar hand popped up at the front. Familiar because it was black and because it was well above the rest of the hands.

It was Sid Catlett, a friend of mine who played on the basketball team and was gaining a reputation as a character. When Bobby had a chance to call on an African-American student, he took it, and so Sid unfolded his gangly frame like a carpenter's rule, stood up to his full six-eight height and asked, in an innocent tone, if it were true that they were planning to raise the maximum height for the draft.

There was a momentary, stunned pause while Bobby looked back at Sid, and then the place erupted in laughter and Bobby said, "I don't think you need to worry about it." The rest of the speech, as best I recall, was kind of wonkish, but he was a good public speaker and, as speeches go, he did all right.

So Bobby finished his speech and took off and that was my memory of Bobby Kennedy on campus. And I was going to say that I remember him coming to campus but all I remember was that we were all on campus -- I had no memory of the date or even the month. I'd have to find out when the Indiana Primary was if I were going to pin it down.

When I went digging around for a photo for this blog, however, I came across the specific date: April 4.

He appeared at Notre Dame in the late morning, then went down to Muncie for an appearance at Ball State, and then flew to Indianapolis. On his way to the airport, he was told of Martin Luther King's assassination; on his arrival, he was told Dr. King was dead, and he gave a memorable speech that night to the crowd that is credited with keeping Indianapolis from burning when the rest of the nation was in chaos.

Until this evening, I did not realize I had seen him that day. I remember very well being in an auditorium that night: It was the Sophomore Literary Festival and I was sitting in the balcony when, just before the speaker was introduced, the announcement was made. If you ask me about the day Dr. King was shot, that's what I remember. Nothing about what I did that morning, just where I was when I heard the news.

However, Hillary is right: Because I was a college kid and had the touchstone of hearing the news at home rather than on campus, I remember that Bobby died in June.

After a tough 10 weeks of campaigning. If he'd entered the New Hampshire Primary, it would have been 12 tough weeks. Hillary forgot that part.

See, none of us have perfect memories.

I got nothin' to add.

OVE AT FIRST SIGHT
No doubt there is such a thing as love at first sight, but love alone is a very uncertain foundation upon which to base marriage. There should be thorough acquaintanceship and a certain knowledge of harmony of tastes and temperaments before matrimony is ventured upon.

CONDUCT OF A GENTLEMAN TOWARD LADIES
A gentleman whose thoughts are not upon marriage should not pay too exclusive attentions to any one lady. He may call upon all and extend invitations to any or all to attend public places of amusement with him, or may act as their escort on occasions, and no one of the many has any right to feel herself injured. But as soon as he neglects others to devote himself to a single lady he gives that lady reason to suppose he is particularly attracted to her, and there is danger of her feelings becoming engaged.

CONDUCT OF A LADY TOWARD GENTLEMEN
Neither should a young lady allow marked attention from any one to whom she is not especially attracted, for several reasons; one, that she may not do an injury to the gentleman in seeming to give his suit encouragement, another that she may not harm herself in keeping aloof from her those whom she might like better, but who will not approach her under the mistaken idea that her feelings are already engaged.

TRIFLING WITH A MAN'S FEELINGS
Some young ladies pride themselves upon the conquests which they make, and would not scruple to sacrifice the happiness of an estimable person to their reprehensible vanity. Let this be far from you. If you see clearly that you have become an object of especial regard to a gentleman and do not wish to encourage his addresses, treat him honorably and humanely, as you hope to be used with generosity by the person who may engage your own heart. Do not let him linger in suspense; but take the earliest opportunity of carefully making known your feelings on the subject. ... Let it never be said of you that you permit the attentions of an honorable man when you have no heart to give him; or that you have trifled with the affections of one whom perhaps you esteem, although you resolve never to marry him. It may be that his preference gratifies and his companionship interests you; that you are flattered by the attentions of a man whom some of your companions admire; and that, in truth, you hardly know your own mind on the subject. This will not excuse you. Every young woman ought to know the state of her own heart; and yet the happiness and future prospects of many an excellent man have been sacrificed by such unprincipled conduct.

A POOR TRIUMPH
It is a poor triumph for a young lady to say, or to feel, that she has refused five, ten or twenty offers of marriage; it is about the same as acknowledging herself a trifler and a coquette, who, from motives of personal vanity, tempts and induces hopes and expectations which she has predetermined shall be disappointed. Such a course is, to a certain degree, both unprincipled and
immodest.

A STILL GREATER CRIME
It is a still greater crime when a man conveys the impression that he is in love, by actions, gallantries, looks, attentions, all -- except that he never commits himself -- and finally withdraws his devotions, exulting in the thought that he has said or written nothing which can legally bind him.

THE REJECTED LOVER
Remember that if a gentleman makes a lady an offer, she has no right to speak of it. If she possesses either generosity or gratitude for offered affection, she will not betray a secret that does not belong to her. It is sufficiently painful to be refused, without incurring the additional mortification of being pointed out as a rejected lover.

UNMANLY CONDUCT
Rejected suitors sometimes act as if they had received injuries they were bound to avenge, and so take every opportunity of annoying or slighting the helpless victims of their former attentions. Such conduct is cowardly and unmanly, to say nothing of its utter violation of good breeding.

DEMONSTRATIONS OF AFFECTION
It may be well to hint that a lady should not be too demonstrative of her affection during the days of her engagement. There is always the chance of a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip; and overt demonstrations of love are not pleasant to remember by a young lady if the man to whom they are given by any chance fails to become her husband. An honorable man will never tempt his future bride to any such demonstration. He will always maintain a respectful and decorous demeanor toward her.

A DOMINEERING LOVER
No lover will assume a domineering attitude over his future wife. If he does so, she will do well to escape from his thrall before she becomes his wife in reality. A domineering lover will be certain to be still more domineering as a husband; and from all such the prayer of the wise woman is "Good Lord, deliver us!"

"Social Culture: A Treatise on Etiquette, Self-Culture, Dress, Physical Beauty and Domestic Relations," 1902, the King-Richardson Co., Springfield, Mass. This post was inspired by the continuing disintegration of the comic strip "For Better or For Worse."

Remembering a first flame

When I heard on Maine Public Radio that the Olympic Torch had made it to the top of Mount Everest, it immediately occurred to me that the idea of someone climbing up Mount Everest one-handed with a flaming torch held aloft in the other was kind of ludicrous.

The news reader explained, however, that the Olympic flame was being carried in a special lantern so the torch could be lit from it once they reached the summit.

Ah, I see. Well, excuse my cynicism for suspecting that somewhere on that “special lantern” was inscribed the word “BIC.”

I started bailing out on the Olympics back when Peter Uberoff saved them by turning them from a gathering of amateur athletes into a money-making machine, but I bailed out on eternal flames well before that.

I may go to hell for what I’m about to tell you. There are deep secrets altar boys know that they should probably not disclose to the laity.

I was an altar boy back in the pre-Vatican days when the Mass was said in Latin and only by those of us privileged to be on the altar, where we kept our backs to the congregation and mumbled a lot.

But that also means I grew up in a time of medieval awe, and one Sunday when I was a very young lad, I noticed during Mass that the sacristy candle, the big one in red glass, was burning down to the end.

The nuns had explained to us that this candle meant God was in the church and that it must never, ever go out. But Father hadn’t gotten to the Last Gospel yet and the sacristy candle was already just an anchored wick in about an inch of clear, molten wax.

We finally finished Mass, got off the altar, knelt for the Jube Domine Benedicere and then I hurried back out with a new candle and a taper.

I guess my hand shook as I tried to light the taper from the flame, because the wick was jostled down into the molten wax.

It went out.

I was horrified. I hoped they could get a light from St. Anthony’s, which was about five miles away, but would they then have to have some kind of special ceremony to re-consecrate the church? Would the bishop have to come? How much trouble was I in, in this world and the next?

Though I feared he would tell God and also my parents, I approached the priest and confessed: “The sacristy candle went out.”

He looked at me for a moment, puzzled. “Well, light another one.”

So I struck a match, lit another one, and life went on, a little less mysterious, a little more cynical, a little more inclined to suspect that, if their “special lantern” had failed, the Chinese weren’t going to climb back down the mountain and head to Athens for a relight.

(An editor's note from the Franklin Journal, 5/09/08. I don't normally repost these,
but thought people here might get a kick out of this one.)

1000 Spring Peepers and 1 ad libber

(Apologizing in advance for the quality of the video, which was unplanned.)

It is spring in Western Maine. I was out walking the dogs and the spring peepers were making such a racket that I thought I'd see if my little point-and-shoot would record it.

However, there wasn't much action, and Ziwa, who thinks all nature documentaries should be like "Big Cat Diary," decided to improve the film.

Close encounter of the Bullwinkle kind

So now I've seen my second Maine moose, and this time it was up close and personal.

Last February, less than a month after I moved here, I saw my first Maine moose on the road between the office and my house, but he took off into the woods as soon as I began to slow down to get a picture. "Next time, maybe I'll get one of the kind that pauses to strike a pose," I wrote.

Heh. Careful what you wish for.

Thursday, I was headed for a school board meeting at a district about 35 miles north of here. The towns up there are mostly crossroads with a post office, a general store, sometimes a garage or a woodmill or something, and a smattering of homes, and there are long stretches of woods between them. I was about three miles from the high school when I came up over a rise and saw a moose just emerging from a pond by the side of the road and starting across.

I'm not sure how old he was -- his antlers were in the early stages of formation for the year and still just bulbous protrusions -- but he was no kid. Mature males average over half a ton, so there is plenty of incentive not to run into them with your car.

I was running a little late and was going 55 or 60 -- not terribly fast but fast enough that I had to put on the brakes with a little more vigor as I approached "X" on our converging paths. And our paths were converging, because, while he clearly had seen me, he hadn't come up with a plan yet and was still meandering from left to right and from the oncoming lane into mine.

So I applied the brakes more and contemplated going into the oncoming lane to go behind him, but of course that was the point at which Bullwinkle decided to stop and ponder the situation, with a hoof or two across the yellow line and his bulk squarely in that other lane.

Accordingly, I put the brake pedal completely to the floor and fortunately, as I came to a halt, he did take a step backwards out of my lane, turning slightly so that we were now facing the same direction, about six or eight feet apart, me looking slightly upward at his profile, which included a big white-rimmed eye that was staring at me askance and which, in a horse, would prompt you to say, very calmly, "whoa, big fella, whoa, now ... "

A horse, however, wants to avoid a confrontation with you, and especially wants to avoid harming you. A moose has no such instinct, and I couldn't tell whether he was deciding to run away from the devil-beast or to smash it into a pile of scrap. I don't think he had a clear idea of which way he was going to go with this, either, and, since my wheels had only momentarily stopped rolling, I decided to let them start up again.

As I pulled away, it occurred to me that I hadn't gotten a picture, despite having my camera on my hip. I looked up into the rearview mirror and he was still standing there, having turned back to his original crossing-the-road position but watching my car drive off, and, for a moment, I thought about getting out the camera and going back, but I couldn't imagine that, in the very small brain encased in that massive body, my coming back would be interpreted as a friendly gesture, so I just kept on going to the meeting and he just kept on going to wherever he had been headed.

Hence an illustration today that was originally part of an autumn post. Note the important message written on it. There was no such sign anywhere around this encounter, but you can't possibly post all the roads where these guys are apt to turn up around here.

After the meeting, I had to get some information from the district's facilities manager. They're likely to switch to wood pellets for heat, a topic I'll have to treat at some length another time -- we're in the middle of timber country and the district will save about 50 percent on the switch. As we were walking out, I told him about my encounter and he said, yes, that the moose were not only becoming more common on the roads but that, this time of year, you occasionally even find one kneeling in the roadway licking the asphalt because of the residue of salt from the winter.

For my part, I was glad this happened on the way to the meeting, with the sun still up, rather than the way home, since moose are black and not easy to pick out in the dark.

There have been a lot of moose incidents in the past few months, because the heavy snow has brought both moose and deer out onto the roadways and snowmobile trails, where they can travel more easily than in the deep snow.

The next day, I told the story to the woman who manages our biweekly paper in Rangeley, who told me her husband and some of his buddies had been going down a snowmobile trail a few weeks ago when they came upon a bull ambling down the trail ahead of them. They slowed down for awhile, figuring he'd head off into the trees at some point, but, when he didn't, they stopped for lunch.

However, even after that pause, it only took a few miles and there he was, still going his way and theirs, so they slowed down again and this time he did step off the path long enough for four of the five snowmobiles to get past him.

He attacked the fifth.

Being antler-less at the time, he used his front hooves to drive two holes through the cowling at the front of the sled, then smashed the windshield and sent the driver flying into the snow with some serious but non-life-threatening injuries. As the windshield disappeared, the driver had punched the moose in the nose and that, combined with the other sleds turning back to assist, drove the bull off into the woods.

People here like moose. They like to hunt them, mind you, and I've had moose meat, which isn't very different from venison, which in turn isn't very different from mutton. But they also like having them around, they like them as a symbol of Maine and even the old time Mainers are fascinated by them.

But from a distance. Stupid, huge and belligerent are not really a good combination when you're close enough for misunderstandings.

Oh dear.
National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley on ABC's "This Week"

Hopefully, in about nine months, we'll have a new crew in the White House. I hope they bring their own globe.

It's not a bird! It's not a plane!
It's a Flogo!

Some strange things come across my desk. Here's one of the strangest.

As near as I can tell, this involves creating molds with soap and helium and then letting them float away. Here's the on-line press release, and here's the not-to-be-missed TOP SECRET video.

Best idea I've seen since Neuticles.

Deprogramming Teddies

(This article first appeared in Boulder Monthly in September, 1979.
I was their humor columnist for about a year.)

You see them everywhere, it seems: on streetcorners, in airports, at rock concerts. Nicely dressed young men and women, apparently college age, well-groomed, with freshly scrubbed faces and bright eyes, approaching people at random, handing out little buttons and pamphlets and talking quickly, intensely, with a fixed smile and eager, searching eyes, telling anyone who will listen about their cause.

They seem to come from every walk of life, from every income group, from various ethnic and social backgrounds, and they have given up college, turned their backs on their budding careers, moved out of the home, all to promote the man they claim will unify America and bring peace, prosperity, and social equality to our troubled land: Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Who are these "Teddies," as they are called by others, though they call themselves members of the "Kennedy for President Committee"?

We spoke with famed deprogrammer Pat Theodore about the Teddies.

"A Teddie could be anyone," he told us. "Your son, your daughter, your brother or sister. For the most part, they are bright, middle-class kids, and it's hard for many people to understand how these kids could get involved in what seems on the surface to be a fanatical cult. But you must understand the way these cults work. They prey upon impressionable young people who may be disillusioned with the world around them and maybe a little lonely in their personal life, too. It's really a form of brainwashing."

These kids, then, actually believe that Senator Kennedy could be the next President of the United States?

"More than that," Theodore tells us, "they believe that he will be able to do extraordinary things: limit strategic arms, curb inflation, solve the energy problem, bring about an equitable system of low-cost health care for everyone in America, etcetera, etcetera. The powers they attribute to this man are really quite extraordinary and obviously irrational. This is what is frightening about the Teddies, that they truly believe all these things and are willing to do almost anything to bring about this perfect world that they envision."

Elizabeth Luepner is a quiet, dark-haired young girl who looks as if she would be a member of the Future Teachers of America or perhaps a promising young piano student. But Lisa, as she is called, has dropped out of school and spent a harrowing six months as a Teddie, six months that ended when Pat Theodore, together with her mother and a family friend, snatched the young girl from a streetcorner and spirited her away to a remote cabin where they spent five days in the process known as "deprogramming." Lisa is now recovered and planning to return to school in the fall.

"It was, like, everything you did, you asked yourself, 'Will this help Teddy get elected?'" she told us. "There was just no time for you to sit around and wonder if he was, like, you know, everything they said he was."

A typical day in the life of a Teddie begins early, according to Lisa.

"We'd get up around five in the morning and have a quick breakfast, and then we'd all get together and stuff envelopes for maybe three hours. Then, like, we'd break, but instead of relaxing or something, they'd have what they called 'mini-rallies.'"

The infamous mini-rallies, according to Theodore, are one of the Teddies' most powerful brainwashing techniques. Lisa tells us about one:

"This guy got up, and he made kind of a short speech like he was nominating Teddy for the Presidency, like we were in New York at the Convention. As soon as he said, 'The Senator from Massachusetts, Edward M. Kennedy,'like, there'd be all this music and we'd all jump up and start cheering and running around the room with all these posters and banners, throwing confetti and everything, and chanting 'Teddy! Teddy! Teddy!' The first mini-rally, you know, I thought it was all pretty weird and all, but, like, you get caught up in it. It's really kind of fun."

After the mini-rally, the Teddies eat a light lunch while one of the leaders delivers an address on a topic of interest. Health Care, Salt II, OPEC, and inflation are popular subjects, and each Teddie is expected to be up-to-date on the various positions of the Senator. After lunch, they troop down to the infamous boiler room.

"There'd be, like, all these phones," Lisa recalls. "We'd each have a phone and a list of numbers, and we'd just call people and ask them questions. First, we'd ask if they were registered to vote. If they weren't, we'd tell them how to go about it and offer to send someone out there to help them register. Then you'd ask if they had decided who they wanted to support, but you wouldn't ask it quite like that, you'd say, like, 'Are you interested in making sure that the next president will whip inflation?' or whatever, you know, depending on what topics were really hot that day or something. And then you'd start talking about Teddy."

For more advanced Teddies, the afternoon was time to hit the streets, going to shopping centers, busy streetcorners, airport lobbies, anywhere where people gather, to pass out information and ask for donations. It was during Lisa's afternoon session on the street that she was "kidnapped" by the deprogramming team. Pat Theodore picks up the story:

"We have to, first of all, get the young person away from the Teddies. It can get a little hairy, but it has to be done. Then we get them someplace where they have to listen to what we're saying. You see, they are brainwashed to the point where they refuse to listen; they don't hear you. Usually, the first day or two, you just keep at them, but they tune you out or else they try to argue with you about some obscure points in the National Health Insurance plan. They're pretty well drilled on that. But after awhile, you start to get through, and then there's usually a lot of crying and hugging, as they realize what's been happening."

Lisa remembers the breakthrough in her deprogramming. "We were told that all the stuff about Chappaquiddick and getting thrown out of Harvard for cheating and getting drunk on press planes and all that was just lies or exaggerations, put out by these conservative Republicans to keep Teddy from becoming President," she says. "Really. They told us that people who said bad things about Teddy were Republicans and that they were going to get us and torture us and make us vote for Ronald Reagan. We were told that we had to resist these people and that if we didn't, they'd make us join the Young Republicans and we'd end up working to defeat Kennedy in 1980."

Did it ever occur to Lisa that Edward Kennedy might not get the nomination in New York? "That was kind of what broke me through on the whole thing. Mr. Theodore kept saying 'He's not even a candidate!' I had heard that before, of course, but we were told that it was something they called a 'Divine Deception,' just to keep the Carter people from getting on his case before we were ready. Then Mr. Theodore said that Bobby had done the same thing in 1968, pretending he wasn't running until Eugene McCarthy had won the New Hampshire primary and that Teddy wasn't fooling anybody in the Carter camp; he was just fooling the American people. I fought it for a long time, but he showed me all these quotes, you know, about who was going to kick who and things like that, and then I realized that he was right. And, like, I realized that all the other stuff was probably true, too, like, he hadn't been kidnapped by Republicans at Chappaquiddick but just ran away and all stuff like that."

Deprogramming isn't the end of the process. "Lisa has to rethink a lot of things," Pat Theodore tells us. "You have to remember that, in addition to living in a world where Edward Kennedy is going to solve all the problems, she's been involved in a cult system that makes a basic assumption, that politics generally can solve complex social problems in an effective manner that is democratic and equitable. If she were to go back out on the streets without unlearning that, she'd be easy prey for any number of cults that are particularly active at this time. She'd be back stuffing envelopes and making phone calls for some other false Messiah and the entire deprogramming process would be a waste."

What does Lisa think about the 1980 elections now? She ponders for a moment before answering. "I guess, like, I'll have to see who the candidates are, you know, and if one of them says he has all the answers, well, I'll vote for the other one. But I guess they'll both say that, so probably I guess I'll just see which one scares the hell out of me the least and vote for him."

Lisa seems well on the road to a normal view of life.

(At the time this was written, Kennedy had not declared himself one way or the other. But there was three weeks lead time before the magazine appeared and another four that it sat on the shelf, during which he could have made an announcement that would have torpedoed the joke. Fortunately, he continued to dance throughout the entire seven weeks, bless his soul. The illustration is credited to Jim Howard, but I was living in Colorado Springs, did this all by mail and never met any of the Boulder Monthly people, and I know nothing about him. Good illustration, though. )